“My uncle is, above all, a principled artist. His lifelong ambition was not only to define an epoch but to transcend all time. In his memoirs, he described his designs as machines with no superfluous parts, that at their best, at his best, possessed an immoveable core; a "Hard Core of Beauty." Older Zsofia (Ariane Labed)
Every so often a great film is found in a year of good ones. It may be argued that Oppenheimer was such an Oscar winner. For the year 2024, The Brutalist has a similar feel, only better. It has a retro-classical cast to it with more layers of meaning and nuance than Oppenheimer. The Brutalist should win at the 2025 ceremony, despite its 3h 15m length (Oppenheimer was similarly long).
In its epic scope, The Brutalist echoes There Will Be Blood and The Fountainhead in their architectural topic and the protagonists’ persistent ambition. The Brutalist tells of licensed architect Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody, sure to be Oscar nominated) in mid-20th century fleeing Europe to America to embellish his reputation and create lasting structures that defy the destruction of WWII, creating lasting edifices of unusual beauty.
Because Laszlo is Jewish, writer/director Brady Corbet and writer Mona Fastvold have created a fictional hero who suffers the ambivalence of Westerners to Jews and their disdain toward immigrants. No better emblem of this strained attitude is Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce), benefactor and self-centered industrialist whose relation to Laszlo is initially benign but fraught as the theme of capitalism’s relationship to art is made manifest in its fraught evolution.
After a well-deserved intermission, The Brutalist devolves into a complex of ambitions and rocky love, emphasized by an ambivalence toward the seemingly ugly construction of Harrison’s community center conflicting with Laszlo’s growing architectural inspiration.
For its lengthy exposition, The Brutalist takes us on the life journey of an artist even more tortured than Michaelangelo might have been. At the least it is never dull, if for only the magisterial cinematography. Not afraid of the dark or the bizarre, it is filmmaking in all its forms, like the art of film itself: immortal and endlessly beautiful in its variety, even when it’s about concrete.
“When dogs get sick, they often bite the hand of those who fed them, until someone mercifully puts them down.” Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr.
The Brutalist
Director: Brady Corbet (Melancholia)
Screenplay: Corbet, Mona Fastvold (Vox Lux)
Cast: Adrien Brody (The Pianist), Guy Pearce (Memento)
Rating: R
Length: 3h 34m
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com